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This month’s recommendations from our bookstore staff feature the feel-good power of food, hot chilies to eat and admire, a mist-shrouded casino, and essays on all things monstrous.

Max Ritvo began as my student. I met Max when he was a senior at Yale. This is how he began his application to get into my playwriting workshop: Dear Professor Ruhl, Thanks for reading this application. My name is Max Ritvo—I’m a senior English major in the Creative Writing Concentration. All I want to do is write. His application said that he was a poet and a comedian, part of an experimental comedy troupe. A poet and he’s funny? Huh. I reread his application, which had been left to stew in the “no” pile because he’d never written a play before. And because funny poets are a rare and wonderful species of human being, I moved Max to the “yes” pile, despite his lack of experience writing plays. It is hard to imagine now that Max’s application could ever have remained in any other pile—a strange parallel universe in which I never met Max.

This week marks two years since we opened Milkweed Books, our independent bookstore in the Open Book building. Here are this month’s recommendations, in which four real people suggest good books we think you might like, too!

Max Ritvo was a prodigiously gifted poet; toward the end of his life, he was also volcanically productive. Nothing he wrote was without flashes of brilliance, but many of these late poems would surely have been revised or jettisoned; it was slow work to sift out the very best. This he asked me to do—it seemed to me an essential labor lest the weaker poems dilute the stronger. What follows, obviously, reflects my judgment. Nothing has been revised; Elizabeth Metzger, Max’s designated literary executor, suggested one minute cut. Cancer was Max’s tragedy; it was also, as he was canny enough to see, his opportunity. Poets who die at twenty-five do not commonly leave bodies of work so urgent, so daring, so supple, so desperately alive.

From the author of Bright Dead Things comes The Carrying, her most powerful collection yet. And now, for the first time, we’re thrilled to share Limón’s entire collection in audiobook. Listen to a preview here.

What borders are really about, and what we do with them. The fullness of what it is to be Mexican (and American). A preview of Luis Alberto Urrea’s contribution to the forthcoming anthology Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place.

Rick Barot, judge of the seventh annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, has selected Twin Cities resident Claire Wahmanholm to be recipient of the 2018 prize, for her manuscript, Wilder. Wahmanholm will receive $10,000 as well as publication by Milkweed Editions in November 2018.

2000 miles by bicycle, 64 days, 30+ events, 9 states, two authors, 1 canoe … and YOU!

We are pleased to announce that judge Victoria Chang has selected John McCarthy’s collection Scared Violent Like Horses as winner of the 2017-18 Jake Adam York Prize for a first or second collection of poems, presented in partnership by Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions. McCarthy will receive $2,000 and his collection will be published by Milkweed in February 2019.

Less than two years ago, Max Ritvo came into the Milkweed family like a ball of fire. We’re thrilled to share with you his next two books: Letters from Max, a book of correspondence between Max and the playwright Sarah Ruhl; and The Final Voicemails, a second collection of poems edited by Louise Glück.